


At The Bottom Of Everything

by Anonymous



Category: Captain America (Movies) RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF
Genre: Airplane Crashes, Alternate Universe, And All Heartbreak Is Temporary, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anniversary, Except They're Not Really, Fluff, Happy Ending, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Presumed Dead, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-19
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-03-24 21:16:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3784540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six years.</p><p>That’s what they’re celebrating. Six years, of them. Of this.</p><p>That's what Chris is happy about.</p><p>Until the phone rings. Until he turns on the news.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [luninosity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/gifts).



> I saw that it was [luninosity](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity)'s birthday, and while I didn't have time to finish the whole fic before the end of the weekend, I wanted to post what I had as close to the actual day (which may have already passed, I suppose, as it is the end of the weekend now) as possible. Happy birthday! Here is some angst?
> 
> Probably the most important thing to point out here is that no horrible ends befall these characters. So don't worry :-)  
>  

Six years.

That’s what they’re celebrating. Six years, of them. Of this.

Sebastian’s been out West for the past few weeks, all meetings and figuring details on a new project. He shouldn’t be cutting things short, coming back for this weekend. For a date that’s arbitrary, really. Just the day they agreed on what to call the tightness in their chests. The warmth in their stomachs. The curl of their lips that they’d known for so long and never named. 

It’s just a day in the face of so many days. 

_Like hell_ , Sebastian had replied when Chris had tried to reason, to tell him to stay and finish, to not ask for any favors or inconvenience anyone on Chris’s behalf. _Like hell I’ll miss this. Like hell I’ll miss this with you._

Admittedly, after that, Chris hadn’t put up much of a fight.

He’s ready. He’s more than ready to wrap Sebastian in his arms and to breathe him in. To smell the brew of Seb’s coffee before he makes Chris’s because Chris likes it plain and bitter these days, and Sebastian still favours those nutty blends from fuck knows where, and somehow the two taste gorgeous together when Chris leans in and steals a kiss and memorises the shape of the curve of Seb’s mouth beneath his tongue. 

Six years.

Chris has had the ring for the past two.

He thinks the time to use it, to ask if it’s wanted, is now.

So it’s with a flutter beneath his ribs and a twitch to the corners of his lips that he makes his cup of coffee. That he closes his eyes and imagines the tangle of Sebastian’s coffee, Sebastian’s breathing, Sebastian’s _everything_ against Chris’s own. It’s with joy, and the kind of nerves that Chris has learned mean anticipation, learned to breathe through because of where they lead, that Chris greets the morning, falls into the relative quiet, the still. Listens to his heartbeat. Thinks about what it means to offer that to Sebastian alongside everything else. Wonders at how a piece of metal on a finger could ever mean more than what they’ve already given, already pledged. What they already are.

It’s from a place of joy that he answers his phone when it rings.

***

“Chris.” His brother says across the line. “Where’s Sebastian flying in from?”

“Good morning to you, too.”

“ _Chris_.”

“SeaTac.” It’s only then that Chris’s mind catches up to the frantic edge to the demands. “Why?”

“What airline?” It’s not even just an edge, if Chris is honest. The whole thing is frantic. Every letter of every word. “What’s the flight number?”

“Fuck, Scott.” Chris frowns, and bites his lip as he looks around at the papers on the countertop, seeking out a print-off, a notepad, an _anything_ that might have the information he doesn’t know off the top of his head.

He is suddenly very, very sure that he should know it off the top of his head.

“I’ll have to look it up. _Why_?”

“Chris.” And Chris doesn’t think he’s ever heard his brother sound like this. Sound choked, and hurting, like this. It terrifies him, he thinks. He thinks that’s the best thing to call what’s cold in his veins, just then.

“Chris, have you turned on the news this morning?”

Chris glances to the remote on the arm of the sofa in the next room. “No.”

“Jesus,” Scott breathes out. “I, Chris,” he starts, suddenly begging. “Chris, don’t, I’ll be over, just---”

Chris’s hand is already on the button. Chris is already turning on the television. The television is already tuned to the news.

It’s in bold letters, on a long ribbon of red. Ticker-style.

_Plane. Engine malfunction. Explosion upon takeoff._

He doesn’t know the flight number. He doesn’t know the airline. 

Except that he _knows_.

There is a buzzing that is growing in his ears. A brightness that is overtaking the edges of his vision, burning at his eyes. He blinks, and there’s nothing. He breathes, and his heart catches sharp against his lungs. He thinks he falls to his knees on the fake wood of the kitchen floor. He thinks his stomach might wretch. He thinks he might have been on that plane, too. Thinks he might have died in midair.

Chris doesn’t hear anymore, after that.

***

“Chris.”

Chris hears his name. He thinks he hears his name.

“Chris, come on.” There’s a whining, needy quality to the words. He can’t place the voice.

“Fucking hell, Christopher!”

A knock to his shoulder rouses him, and he groans.

“Seb?”

There’s no reply. He cracks his eyes open.

It’s his brother’s face that meets him. His brother’s face, and eyes that ache. That feel.

That mourn to the point of pity.

The world crashes into Chris like a freight train.

“Oh god,” he breathes, or tries to. It catches. It tears. “Oh god, it’s real.”

“Chris.” And Scott’s pale. Scott’s got a printout in his hand. Confirmation. 

“Chris, we don’t know,” Scott tries. “We don’t know for sure, he might have missed his flight.”

Chris looks around. Chris is on the floor of his kitchen. Chris grabs for his phone, hands shaking, vision blurring as he scans through his texts, looking for the early-morning wish of _safe travels_ to the love his goddamned life.

It had been delivered.

It hadn’t been read.

“There are,” Scott is saying. “There are, numbers, I mean, there are numbers to call, yeah? Numbers to call, the airline...”

“He’s gone.” Chris can’t see. His chest won’t rise, wants to crush his lungs here and now. “Oh my god, he’s gone.”

“Chris, come on,” Scott braces his shoulders, but Chris barely feels it. “Breathe, buddy, come on.”

“He’s gone.” And Chris feels a sharpness, a shrillness, glass about to burst and shatter at the center of his chest, and every beat of his heart might be the breaking point, the last straw. 

“He’s gone, he’s gone, Scott.” Chris blinks, tries to focus on his brother, but he’s lightheaded. He’s lost. 

“Scott, he’s gone. He’s _gone_ , and I can’t, I can’t, I’m---”

Every beat of his heart is a tipping point. A threat.

Chris wants it to give in. Wants it all to fall.

“Chris,” Scott’s saying. “Chris, you got to breathe, man.” And Chris doesn’t mean to scare his brother. Chris doesn’t mean to. “Just breathe.”

“He’s gone,” Chris gasps, because there’s no air in the world anymore. There’s no Sebastian, so there’s no air.

There’s no reason for air.

“He’s, I’m, he’s...”

Chris feels the shiver, the way his pulse trips, seems to explode into nothing as he loses focus, as he dips into the dark.

“ _Chris_!”

***

Sebastian doesn’t know how in the hell, in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world, he can fail to keep a cell signal. Yet, try as he might, when he tries to so much as check his texts: nothing.

He sighs. It’s not the first thing that’s gone absolutely fucking wrong in this endeavour. 

He’d been booked to leave Friday morning, to get in late-afternoon and take the train out toward Chris to get in by early-evening, hopefully in time to make the dinner reservation’s he’d made. Kick off the weekend.

But Sebastian’s not going to pretend he’s anything less than fucking sentimental, and as the day had approached, he’d realised: early-evening wasn’t soon enough.

So he’d booked a flight on Thursday instead, aimed at getting into Logan just in time to make it to Chris’s before midnight. To climb into bed with his lover, his partner, his blood and his bones and his heart all at once and take all the time they had for _them_ , to soak up the long weekend from the very first possible moment. To press against that long body and melt into the line of every muscle. To breathe in Chris from every angle, chest to chest. To tell Chris he loved him, face to face, every moment. 

Sentimental, as he’d said. So he’d wrapped up business as quick as he could, delegated what he couldn’t, and hopped a plane back east.

It’d gone off without a hitch, too. Until the layover at O’Hare.

Because god forbid planes arrive on time. And god forbid people don’t fucking puke all over said planes so that the seats have to be scrubbed down. And god forbid there be another plane to take this plane’s place. Basically, god forbid Sebastian try to be a fucking romantic sap successfully, is what it looks like.

They’re in the air by 8am, central time. Sebastian’s mostly just glad he didn’t tell Chris he was coming early, that he wanted it to be a surprise.

It’d sting that much worse, he knows, if he knew they were both disappointed by how things were turning out.

Of course, his troubles don’t end there. Logan’s crowded, because it’s morning on a fucking Friday. He’s missed his pick-up time for the car that he’d booked to take him up to North Station. He’s convinced it’s the sheer fucked-ness of the universe across the past twenty hours trying to make up for itself that lets him get a rental car within an hour. 

He’s convinced the universe doesn’t care about making up for anything by the time he merges onto 90 and joins the fucking crawl of cars westward. 

He chooses not to stop himself from banging his head onto the steering wheel in frustration. It’s not like he’ll need to fucking step on the gas to _move_ in the time it takes to vent his emotions.

It’s with a sigh, a really fucking long one filled with relief and the wishful thinking that maybe the impossible had happened, and maybe Chris was sleeping in and Sebastian could still crawl into bed with him, still get _something_ to go right in this shitstorm. But it’s with a sigh that he finally pulls up to the house, their house, and maybe they’ve never said it, but it is, it’s theirs. It’s with a sigh that he finally pulls up to their house after the trip from the airport took exactly two-and-a-half times as long as GPS said it should have. 

It’s with a sigh that he goes for the spare key beneath the gutter off the garage---because Chris had lost his keys last week and there wasn’t any sense feeding his anxious mind when they could just call a locksmith---and finds the hiding place empty.

He grabs his phone from his pocket, half-forgotten with how it had failed him in the city, to see full-bars on the screen.

Typical.

He breathes out slowly, steadies himself, tries not to be angry at the world for fucking up his plans as he calls Chris’s mobile.

Better late than never, he reminds himself, as the line rings through.

Better late than never.

***

The line connects abruptly, just before it goes to voicemail.

“Who is this?”

Sebastian blinks. “Who is _this_?”

“You fucking called,” the voice, which isn’t Chris’s, bites out sharply. “You don’t even know who you fucking _called_?”

“Scott,” Sebastian rolls his eyes, once he places the tone. “You’re an asshole. Where’s Chris?”

“Who _is_ this?”

“You fucking answered the phone,” Sebastian deadpans, snarks Scott’s argument right back at him. “You didn’t look at who is was?”

He probably doesn’t give Scott enough time to respond, if he was planning to. Oh well.

“Are you here?” Sebastian asks. “I can’t find the fucking spare key, and I don’t have the new one, haven’t been home yet.” He glances around idly from the porch, only then seeing the unfamiliar car pulled in around the side of the drive. 

“Dude, is this your car out here?” Sebastian gives a low whistle. “Nice, man. When’d you get a new ride?”

He stops staring at the car only when he hears the door open. It only takes a moment to see that there’s something off. Something wrong.

“Sebastian.” Scott looks white as a fucking ghost. Scott looks like he can’t believe his eyes.

Scott looks like he might throw up.

“Oh, god,” Scott says, and the phone still held to his ear clatters to the floor of the foyer. “Seb, you, you’re---”

And a Scott who’s lost for words is strange enough, unsettling enough. 

But a Scott who’s eyes are watering...

Sebastian’s chest seizes up quick. Tight.

“Scott?” Sebastian dares to ask. “What’s---” 

His voice cracks as Scott grabs him, hugs him close. Shakes. And something’s wrong. Something is very wrong.

Something is wrong, very wrong, and Sebastian can’t keep his heart from pounding, can’t keep himself from glancing over Scott’s shoulder and searching for the one thing he wants, the one thing he needs.

 _Chris_.

He comes up short.

His heart keeps pounding.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You are all so wonderful with your comments! It means a great deal that you're enjoying this.
> 
> I am afraid that this got longer than I had intended. It'll be hopefully done at three chapters, but don't be surprised if it goes on toward four. Sorry?

Sebastian blinks, breathes, only just manages to swallow around the heavy pulse in his throat. Tries to process. 

Fails, yet again. 

Because this. 

This can’t be real.

Sebastian opens his mouth to speak but there aren’t any words. He breathes in again, slower and deeper and stinging in his lungs. He can’t make sense of this, even as Scott shows him the news, feeds him the footage, spells it out in black and white. Again in bleeding colour.

He can’t make sense of this, not even a little bit. There’s too much, it’s too much.

There’s only one thing. One thing that means everything.

Sebastian raises his head and looks Scott straight in the eye before he asks the only question he seems to be able form.

“He’s okay, though?”

Scott nods. “As okay as he can be.”

“You said he passed out…”

“Hyperventilated.” Scott’s voice is tight. “Twice. Then I think he just kind of…” Scott shrugs, tries to soften the blow of it in the gesture. “Sobbed himself into sleep. I got him into the guest room down here.” 

Scott’s eyes flicker to Sebastian’s before they glance away, quick darts. Frightened animal scurries. 

“Couldn’t manage to get him up the stairs. He...”

Sebastian frowns deeper. “What?”

The printout of his original itinerary is crumpled in his hands, testament to the almosts, to the could have beens. He wrings it tighter, paper pulp flaking on his skin.

He can see Scott swallow, clear against his throat.

“He said he couldn’t.” Scott’s voice is small. Not like Scott. “Not without you.” 

There’s a sound that breaks through the stillness and expands through the space that surrounds them. It’s a hateful sound, a mournful sound. A sob that doesn’t even get that far, that gets crushed, that dies on its way to the surface. Aborted.

It tastes sour on Sebastian’s tongue.

“He wasn’t exactly coherent.” Scott tries to smooth the ache, but Sebastian’s eyes must speak for him, because he gives it up quickly. 

Sebastian feels lightheaded. Sebastian thinks he might be sick.

Scott reaches over and grabs Sebastian’s hand.

It’s Sebastian’s turn to swallow hard.

“Seb,” Scott starts, shaking his head, his voice a low crackle, a tapestry of loose threads, and if Scott, who’s family now, true, but is _Scott_ , if _he’s_ this emotional, if he’s this shaken up then what of Chris? What of Chris in bed, what of Chris grasping for breaths and finding them scarce, what of Chris falling to pieces and Sebastian now there to catch them, to hold him together, what of Chris falling to pieces _because Sebastian wasn’t there_...

“I can’t tell you how…” Scott’s eyes squeeze shut, and he sighs out heavily. “I’m so happy to see you.” Scott bites his lip. “You’ve got,” and his voice cracks, and Sebastian’s chest threatens to follow its example. “You’ve got no idea.”

Scott’s hand tightens on Sebastian’s for a second before Scott schools his expression and pulls back. Sebastian is grateful, is touched, is aching with Scott’s feeling. Sebastian’s more grateful, however, that he’s letting him go.

Because Sebastian can be told that Chris is okay until the end of the world. He needs proof, though.

He needs to see it.

“I’m gonna,” Sebastian breathes out carefully, nodding down the hall. 

“I’ll leave you to it.” Scott stands. “But I’m a phone call away. You need anything, you let me know. And I mean it, too.” His gaze is earnest. “Anything.”

“Thanks, Scott.” Sebastian reaches out, pulls a handshake into a hug, because it’s not every day you cheat fate. It’s not every day you come back from the dead.

“Go put his heart back together,” Scott tells Sebastian, voice low at Sebastian’s shoulder as the pulls away, as Scott grips his biceps meaningfully. Tight.

Sebastian’s own heart sinks, because that’s his only purpose, his only lot in life. Keeping Chris’s heart safe. Keeping Chris’s heart _whole_.

“And before you go and misconstrue that in your stupid fucking head,” Scott shoves at Sebastian’s shoulder to get his attention. “It isn’t your fault it’s broken.” Scott’s tone allows no argument, but Sebastian’s chest doesn’t loosen. Can’t.

 _Chris_.

Scott clamps a hand onto Sebastian’s shoulder, then, demanding his concentration. Trying his damnedest to sway Sebastian’s self-loathing from its hold.

“If anything,” Scott tells him, and it’s a family trait, that conviction. That unwavering, contagious belief. “ _You’re_ the only reason that it’s able to be fixed at all.”

Sebastian hears it. He can’t follow the reasoning.

“I don’t understand.”

Scott smiles, but it’s strained.

“You love him so much, that you weren’t on that plane. You couldn’t wait.” Scott’s eyes are wide. Imploring. “You couldn’t wait to _take that plane_.” 

Sebastian frowns, uncomprehending.

“If you hadn’t wanted to be here, with him,” Scott explains. “You’d have,” he swallows. “It...”

And it hits Sebastian swift, hard. One way or another, directly or indirectly, intentional or otherwise, however the world turns: it’s for a love of Chris that Sebastian’s still standing, still breathing.

“Right,” Sebastian breathes out. “Right.”

Sebastian makes his way to the guestroom. And the funny thing is, that it was true before this morning, that the love of Chris kept his world spinning, kept his heart from giving out. That’s been true for _years_.

That will _always_ be true.

***

Chris starts to surface. Chris starts to come to, and he’s not sure why inside that middle ground why his heart is pounding, why his throat is dry, why the skin around his eyes feel raw and thing. He isn’t sure.

“Breathe, Chris.”

The voice is known to him like his own flesh and bones. The voice is the press of his own palm and the run of his own blood. The voice is music. 

Chris listens. Oblivion comes again, and there’s warmth all around him now.

The darkness greets him with heat. With love. Sleep flows to the pace of a pulse against his ear.

Whatever was trying to dig its claws into Chris’s chest just then, whatever truth was waiting to plague him on waking: it retreats.

***

The beat of a heart against his cheek conducts the hum of his pulse. The limbs wrapped about him are protection, a promise. The rise of a chest under his head coaxes him to come awake.

“Seb.”

“Right here, baby,” Sebastian murmurs at the crook of his neck. “I’m right here.”

“Mmm.” Chris’s eyes don’t yet open, but he unfolds into Sebastian’s hold, lined up against Sebastian’s body. A perfect fit, as always.

“You.” Chris exhales, stretching until his joints pop, until his toes tingle with the strain. “You’re...”

And it’s then that Chris feels the tender swelling at his eyes, the dried salt on his cheeks. It’s then that everything crashes back relentlessly. Unforgiving. 

“You’re right here.” Chris says it. Chris asks it. 

Chris _prays_ it.

“Right here.” Sebastian nods. Chris can feel it. Sebastian takes his hand and kisses his palm, knuckles, wrist. He feels that too. “You okay?”

Chris can’t answer that question. Chris can’t think clearly. Chris doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

“Oh my god.”

He wants to turn, quick and ruthless, and see the miracle of Sebastian with his own eyes or see the lie of his own broken heart, but he _can’t_.

Sebastian ease him upward. Sebastian tilts his chin to meet his eyes.

Those eyes are Chris’s _home_.

“Oh my god.” Chris’s voice is barely a whisper, is barely rooted in reality. “Are we,” he starts. “Am I...”

“We’re home.” Sebastian smoothes Chris’s hair behind his ear. “Downstairs bedroom. See?” He plucks at the bedding and Chris follows the motion. “It’s that hideous duvet you insisted we buy. No one else in the whole world would have such horrible taste as to purchase it.” Sebastian’s lips quirk, but there’s an odd strain at the corners of that plush, beloved mouth. “So you know it’s ours.”

Chris feels the swell of a chuckle, wet and thin in his chest but it’s not strong enough to make it to the world, to find its way from his lips. He breathes, and there are still pieces of him that shift, shattered and hateful against his bones. He can’t trust, not yet.

But Sebastian is _warm_.

“You’re here.”

Sebastian nods solemnly and squeezes Chris’s hand in his own. “I’m here.”

Something inside Chris trembles at that, trembles and begs to give way.

“Seb.” His voice cracks. “Seb, I had the…” 

Chris’s head spins, his throat tightens. “I thought, I was, you’d---”

Sebastian leans, and lifts Chris’s head a little higher. Sebastian sighs, and strokes Chris’s cheek, then his jaw, then his chin, and then he kisses him.

Chris’s heart cracks open all at once, so different from the breaking, and the losing, and the hurting worse than death.

“I had the worst dream,” Chris tells the crease of Sebastian’s lips. “It was…” 

“Shh,” Sebastian coos, cups his jaw as he starts to shake, as the words and the images and the knowledge and _gone_ start to take him over again. “Shh, I’m here. With you. I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere.”

“You were gone.” The words tear harshly out from Chris’s body, from somewhere dark and bleak and jagged underneath his beating heart. “You were gone, I’d lost you, I couldn’t…”

Chris’s breath catches, and his voice cracks, and his heart gets caught in his throat and he sees in colour all at once because there is _Sebastian_.

It hurts for the brightness because what if it’s not _true_. 

“I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t, I kept…” Chris shakes his head, his face pressed up against Sebastian’s chest, up beneath his chin. Sebastian breathes. Chris can breathe if Sebastian breathes.

“It was dark.” Chris confesses, falls back a little, in his head, to the moments he remembers. Seeing the screen. Seeing his brother. Feeling dead inside. 

“It was dark and I thought, maybe you were…” Chris confesses, voice tiny in what space exists between them. “There. I thought you might be there. And I just wanted to be where you were.” 

Chris pulls back, and Sebastian’s gaze is devastation. Full of the kind of dying Chris can’t bear.

“I couldn’t breathe,” Chris gasps. “Without you.”

“Baby,” Sebastian breathes out, and takes to stroking Chris’s cheek again. And Chris leans in. He leans in. “I’m here.”

“It was so real.” Chris murmurs, the pressure in his chest finally starting to fade. “It was so _real_...”

“I’m real.” Sebastian guides Chris’s hand to his face, to his lips, to the heat of his breaths. “I’m real.”

He pulls Chris’s touch down to the centre of his chest. He lets Chris close his eyes and just feel, and Chris falls into it. That rhythm. That proof. Chris lets it fill every atom of his being and teach it truth anew.

“That’s real.” Sebastian whispers to the space beneath Chris’s ear. “We’re real. It’s okay.” He kisses that sensitive skin. “We’re okay.”

Chris believes it, too. Chris believes that, if they aren’t okay, they will be. Because. Because.

Because Sebastian is breathing next to him. Sebastian is alive. Is here. Is his.

Because he world’s worth living in. There’s air left to breathe.

“I love you.” Chris says it, not because it needs saying. Chris says it because there is nothing else, nothing more important to say. Not ever.

“I love you.” Chris’s heart is beating so hard, so fast. He takes Sebastian’s hand, this time, and presses it to the pounding. He presses it there and calls it proof, as well.

“God, Sebastian. I can’t..” Chris breathes. Chris can _breathe_. “I love you so _much_.”

“I love you back.” Sebastian answers him. Doesn’t think. Doesn’t question. Holds him tighter. “There aren’t words for how much I love you.”

Chris shivers. His eyes pick with feeling, with the definition of what it means to be overwhelmed.

“Come here.” Sebastian gathers him closer. It seems impossible, but Sebastian makes it possible. Sebastian gives them closer.

“I’m tired.” In every way it is possible to be tired, Chris is tired. And Sebastian’s heartbeat is too much like a lullaby.

“Sleep now,” Sebastian speaks into Chris’s hair. “I’m gonna be right here the whole time.”

Chris believes that. Chris believes in warmth. Chris believes in here. Chris believes in the nightmare as it fades.

“I’m right here,” are the last words Chris hears before he loses consciousness. “Always. Always right here.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think perhaps I may have been quite incorrect about the chapter count on this fic. I do apologise. Apparently, these incarnations of the characters want to be soppy a bit longer. Is that okay?

When consciousness comes calling, Chris feels heavy all over. His eyelashes feel weighed down. His limbs seem clasped to the mattress. His lungs are a chore to fill.

He does not, he cannot process why.

There is a warmness, though. There is a warmness that is all around him. He had a chest against his cheek that lifts slowly, and steadily. He knows that chest. He knows how it feels.

He knows that that chest will bring lightness to his own, so he breathes. 

It’s easy.

“Hey.”

Chris can feel the heat of Sebastian’s breath against his temple, rustling through his hair. It works to lift his eyelids. Helps him wake to the world.

“Hey.” Chris blinks, and when Sebastian’s face comes into focus he smiles, because that’s the only thing there is to do. Sebastian’s face is happiness. Sebastian’s face is love. 

Chris melts back into the give of Sebastian’s body and breathes, because it is easy. 

“God, you’re comfortable.”

Sebastian chuckles. “I try.” 

He cups a hand along Chris’s jaw, all tenderness. His voice is low and scratchy, and Chris can tell if he’d been sleeping, too. “You okay?”

“I…”

Chris swallows. He considers the question and the ways he might answer. He waits until he comes to the truth. 

“Yeah.” 

And he is. Sebastian is pressed against him. Sebastian’s heart is beating. Sebastian’s breath tickles on his skin, so yeah. He’s okay. 

“Yeah, just a bad dream, y’know?” Chris shifts a little, looks Sebastian in the eyes.  “But you’re here now, and that,” Chris leans up and kisses the place where Sebastian’s pulse pumps at his jaw. “That’s all that matters.”

Sebastian’s chest brushes Chris’s own when he breathes in deep. Chris isn’t expecting it when Sebastian leans, ducks his head and presses their mouths together, hungry, fierce with it. Hard and fast but unwilling to pull back.

They are panting heavily by the time that they do.

“Babe?”

There is something in Sebastian’s voice that feels strange, but maybe Chris is imagining things. Maybe he just needs to catch his breath.

“I need you to look at me, okay?”

That’s not a trial, of course. Chris looks him full on, and recognises fear for what it is. Chris recognises the full sphere of pumping blood at Sebastian’s throat as more than arousal.

“I’m right here.” Sebastian says. His eyes are so big. His hand is on Chris’s wrist, leading Chris’s palm to the centre of Sebastian’s chest.

Chris frowns. “I know.”

He knows the difference between a dream and reality, no matter how true it had felt. No matter how it hurt to feel what heartbreak really meant. Why every time he’d thought he’d felt it before was a lie.

He knows the difference. Sebastian doesn’t seem to believe it, though.

“I’m here, and I’m fine, and I’m with you.” Sebastian’s saying it, almost rambling it off. “I will always be with you.” His grasp on Chris’s hands tightens, and his eyes don’t find their normal size, not yet. “Never letting go, all right?”

“All right.” Chris murmurs, confused. Sebastian’s heart is a mallet beneath the touch of his hand. 

Sebastian’s eyes are dry, but something streams from them, and damn if Chris knows what it is. Damn if Chris knows anything except for the fact that whatever it is, it catches in his throat. It grows solid in the spaces where his own heart is supposed to squeeze.

“Chris.” 

Sebastian’s voice is small, all raked across sand. 

“Chris, baby.” His voice cracks, and he brings both hands up to hold Chris’s palms close before he whispers:

“It wasn’t a dream.”

There are a lot of the things that happen, once the words are said. The world gets really quiet. Sounds don’t make any sense. Chris is fairly certain that his heart stops. Death might be imminent.

Up might be down. He isn’t sure.

“I don’t...” Chris’s voice is a poor excuse for anything. He can’t help but choke on all that he is, that he knows. 

“I don’t understand.”

“A plane went down.” Sebastian’s voice is gentle, and a just a little bit choked, too. “But I wasn’t on it, okay? I wasn’t on it. And I’m right here with you.”

Sebastian is here. Sebastian is here. His chest is rising. His heart is slamming against his ribs with real gusto, to be honest. He’s here. He’s real.

But a plane crashed. Chris saw it.

“I’m here, and I love you more than life itself, and I am okay,” Sebastian says again, and Sebastian sounds like he is ready to say it every moment of every hour, every hour of every day until the world ends, if he needs to. If Chris needs him to. “I’m alive and I’m here and I’m yours. I will always be yours, and I’m so sorry I scared you.” 

Chris thinks it might take a few moments for him to realise that he’s crying. And he only realises it at all because Sebastian is peppering his cheeks with careful kisses, starlight and baby’s breath and the universe to dry his heartache, to wash it away.

“You...” Chris tries to speak. To find sense. “It happened.” 

Sebastian nods.

“You were supposed to be on that plane?”

Chris’s voice fails him halfway through the thought, but his lips crack around the horror, and Sebastian doesn’t flinch from it. Sebastian takes him as he is, all that he is.

Always.

“I’m _supposed_ to be right here.” Sebastian clutches Chris’s hands, threads their fingers tighter still. “With _you_.”

And that is real. That is true.

Chris can tell the difference between what is and isn’t true.

“And while I had planned to be on that plane,” Sebastian says softly, explains. Confesses sin, somehow, just alongside the unveiling of a miracle. “I couldn’t wait to be with you. Where I _belonged_.” He kisses the back of Chris’s hand, wet and full. “So I’d planned to be on that plane but I wasn’t.” 

Chris blinks. Slowly, Chris nods.

“You weren’t on that plane.”

“No.” Sebastian confirms it, kisses soft at the corners of Chris’s mouth. “No I wasn’t. I was in Boston already by the time it went down.”

Chris feels his brows furrow. “Boston?”

“Probably bitching at Enterprise for a car around then.” Sebastian gives a hint of a smile, but it’s strained as hell. “Or stuck in traffic.”

Chris gives Sebastian what he’s looking for, just that. A laugh, damp and shaky, and broken. But it’s a laugh.

The image of Sebastian behind the wheel in Massachusetts is _always_ funny. Even now.

“Seb.” Chris starts, and it is a breathless sound, that name in what voice he has to give. It is breathless. It is precious. 

He’d lost something precious. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t _live_.

“Seb, you were…” Chris shakes his head, the threads starting to unravel again as the tightness builds inside his chest. “It happened?”

“It happened.” Sebastian nods, gaze filled with so much remorse as he reaches, as he presses one hand against Chris’s to the beat of his heart as the other grips tightly, grounding Chris at the crook of his neck. 

“It happened, but not to _me_ , okay? Not to me, and not to you. Not to _us_.” 

Sebastian stares those words through him in earnest. Chris isn’t sure if it works. Chris isn’t sure what makes sense when his heart is flailing, when it still feels like it should break, should be broken, but Sebastian is warm. Sebastian is here.

 _Sebastian_.

“I’m…” Chris gasps, pulse wild in his throat. “I’m…” He licks his lips, tries to calm something, tries to put something back together in himself.

He can’t.

“My head...”

“Look at me.” Sebastian’s voice is firm, and Chris gravitates to it because that’s what his body, his bones have learned to do. “Deep breaths.” Sebastian models them, and Chris follows his lead. The breathing slows both their heartbeats. It takes time.

Sebastian never stops breathing for him. Sebastian never looks away.

Sebastian is _here_.

“Let’s get some food in you, okay?” Sebastian asks after a long chain of moments where nothing could have fit to say. “Water, at least?” 

He starts to stand, but Chris’s heart lurches, and his arm, his whole frame does the same.

“Don’t leave.”

Those words feel like the edge of the knife that heartbreak --- the one he feels like he should know, still, the one that should keep him from seeing and feeling and being at all in the face of this singular _loss_ \--- those words are the edge. Those words are everything, somehow.

“Wouldn’t even dream of it.” Sebastian smiles tightly, and wraps Chris to him close, no breaths between them, and they stay like that for a minute. They stay like that until Chris remembers how to drop the knife inside his chest. 

“Come on.” Sebastian’s hands never leave him as he eases them both upwards and steadies them both on their feet. “It’ll help your head.”

“Don’t leave, though.” Chris can’t help himself but to say it.

What comes of it is a kiss that feels a little like eternity, that does its absolute damnedest to stitch his heart back to rights, and the arm around his shoulders shifts to place a hand against his heart and he can do this. They can do this.

Sebastian is here.

***

Chris stops just at the threshold before really entering the kitchen. He remembers the floor. He remembers air, and air leaving. He remembers praying for dark.

His heart skips, trips when it starts to race again but Sebastian’s right there. Sebastian doesn’t force him to move any farther. Sebastian knows, somehow.

Chris loves him. Chris never wants to live in a world where Sebastian isn’t.

“I, umm.” Sebastian bites his lower lip. “What sounds good? I can just make some toast, or something…”

“What’s this?” Chris gestures to the countertop, littered with long cardboard boxes with fancy carry-handles and elegant script on the sides.

“Oh.” Sebastian maybe ducks his head. “Umm, I made reservations there for this evening.” He shrugs, and Chris breathes a little more freely. “I know how you love it.”

Chris does. Chris remembers taking Sebastian there for the first time, in the early days. Chris remembers kissing savoury-sweetness out of Sebastian’s mouth between courses, after the check came, in the car.

In his bed before it was _their bed_.

“How’d it get here?”

“I wasn’t sure when you’d wake up. I wanted to make sure if you were hungry, if you needed, that we’d…” 

Sebastian hesitates for just a moment, gathering his wits. Chris yammers on off the cuff on a whim more than he should and he regrets it later almost always, but Sebastian. Sebastian thinks. Sebastian considers. And even when it seems he’s said a thing he shouldn’t have, he means to. He wants to test the reaction, wants to file away the response.

“I texted Scott.” The simple answer. The truth. It makes sense.

It makes sense, Chris reminds himself, because it’s real. He can smell the food. He can feel Sebastian’s hand in his own.

Chris closes his eyes, just for a second, and forces all of it to sink in a little deeper.

It’s real. This is real.

“It’s stupid,” Sebastian’s saying, and Chris realises he’s probably stayed quiet too long. “Of course you don’t want this shit, not…”

“What did you order?”

Sebastian blinks.

“Your usual.”

“Which usual?”

Sebastian raises a brow at him skeptically, and he seems almost offended that the question had to be asked. “All of them?”

Chris smiles, because of course it’s all of them. Of course Sebastian gives him everything.

It’s _Sebastian_.

It is Sebastian, Chris tells his heart, his brain, his feet. It is Sebastian. Move. Walk into the kitchen. Eat something. Breathe.

He’s _here_.

“Do you want to eat in the bedroom?” Sebastian suggests, immediately on point, reading the wavelength of Chris’s anxiety as it builds. “I can plate everything up and you don’t have to be in here at all, we’ll ---”

“No.”

Sebastian turns to him, and Chris hasn’t hid from Sebastian’s eyes as they read him in years. 

He doesn’t start now.

“Let me just…” Chris grips tighter to Sebastian’s hand. “Please.” His fingers settle over the pulse in his wrist, and he shuffles just a little closer to Sebastian’s body, stands close enough to feel the warmth of living rolling off of him in waves. “Can I please?”

“Anything.” Sebastian breathes out vehemently, clutching back just as tightly. “Jesus, Chris, you know that. _Anything_.”

Chris nods, and buries his face against Sebastian’s neck, where Sebastian dips his chin to place a kiss to the top of Chris’s head. Chris sighs at the gesture, at the simple love in it, and he almost lets himself feel at ease, he would have managed it, he thinks. He really would have.

If his gaze hadn’t caught on the blank television screen.

If he hadn’t _remembered_ everything afresh, all over again.

“Not right now, okay?” Sebastian breathes against his hair. “I mean, if you want, if you need to...”

Sebastian gathers him close and strokes down his arms, soothing.

“I just don’t think it’ll do any good, right now. To watch whatever they’re saying. To see it.”

“No.” Chris agrees. Chris never wants to see that again. “No.”

Sebastian’s humming something tuneless, something ageless just above Chris’s ear, rocking them back and forth just a little.  
 “It doesn’t matter, anyway.” And Chris doesn’t say it idly. The news, the loss. Maybe it makes him a monster, unfeeling, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not his news. It’s not his loss.

His heart’s in one piece, still. There’s a miracle wrapped around him.

Nothing else will _ever_ matter.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think there will just be one more chapter of these two, after this one. And I suspect you might be able to guess what happens in it, after all of the hints dropped in this chapter *g*

Sebastian probably should have pushed the point. He realises that, in hindsight. 

They’d spent the evening prior wrapped up in each other. Tears shed. Bodies held. Fears purged as best they could do. Sebastian had taken Chris to bed and tried his best to prove that they were alive, and he was alive, and that no man in his right mind would _not_ be alive when there was _Chris_.

Chris had slept longer than usual, pressed tightly against Sebastian’s warm skin. Maybe Sebastian had held him tighter than usual, too, but Chris’s face had been relaxed, and his smile had been easy, if still a tad exhausted, when he came awake.

Chris had spent more time than strictly necessary kissing wetly and sucking at Sebastian’s neck, but of course neither of them minded. And possibly, Sebastian held his breath once or twice to make sure that the beat under Chris’s lips was strong. Undeniable. Exactly what Chris was looking for and aching for and needing. It’s possible, Sebastian thinks.

They’d be alright, though. Sebastian knows.

They’re neither of them religious, but Sebastian finds Chris on his knees in some of the moments they allow each other out of sight. Sebastian finds him in tears as he whispers gratitude into nothingness, or maybe into all things, or maybe into both. Sebastian doesn’t interrupt.

Sebastian just takes the vice-grip in his own chest at the proof of such _love_ and says his own thanks to whatever cares to hear it. Whoever it might mean something to, if it’s ever known.

“How about Mom’s cannelloni, the one with the sausage and the spinach?” Sebastian asks. He knows how Chris loves his comfort foods, and he knows that Chris’s mother’s cooking fits that bill better than just about anything. He’s got his laptop open to the grocery delivery service while Chris sits atop the counter next to the computer, the tips of his toes stretching to stroke the outside of Sebastian’s thigh. 

“Or I can do Mama’s ciorbă, but you know I can’t make it like she can.” 

He’s quiet, and Sebastian has known Chris, and loved Chris, long enough that he’s well-learned in how to steady Chris when the world gets too much. He feels like it’s a privilege, to be trusted with the whole of Chris. It’s a privilege to have the capacity to do anything at all to help.

But this, though.

This isn’t quite the same, is it.

“Or both, I can do both?” Sebastian offers, casually even where his heart thumps in his throat. “I don’t know how well they’ll go together, but."

He doesn't know how much this will help, either. He doesn't know if anything more than touch and truth and time can take the haunted glaze from Chris's eyes, just in the corner where only Sebastian would even think to look. It may not do any good in the long run. 

But Sebastian loves Chris like he's never loved anyone. Sebastian didn't know love like that could even exist, before there was Chris. So Sebastian will do anything. He will give anything. For Chris. 

He always has.

“You made reservations.”

Chris's eyes are fixed on the way his toes tease Sebastian's skin, back and forth. 

“Just because I made reservations doesn’t mean we have to keep them.”

Chris draws a circle with his big toe at the crease behind Sebastian's knee. 

“We didn’t keep them last night.”

“And the world didn’t end,” Sebastian points out, clicking on the Peapod website and confirming the contents of his shopping bag. "Just a sec, let me send this order."

“No.” 

Sebastian only looks up when Chris's hand lands on his own, as Chris's fingers curl around his wrist. 

"No, let’s go out.” Chris stares at their hands as he twines fingers together, holding them palm against palm and watching, breathing until he sees something, or feels something, or the air in the room shifts just right and the corners of his lips lift. 

“Chris.” Sebastian tries to make it a thing that he says, but it comes out more like a thing that he sighs. 

“Let’s.” Chris tilts his head upward and aims that close approximation of a smile straight at Sebastian, and Sebastian’s hopeless when that happens. Sebastian is boneless in the face of that grin, no matter how it’s strained. 

“It’ll be good.” Sebastian knows that Chris is trying to convince himself as much as he’s making the argument to Sebastian. “Let’s…” Sebastian catches the heavy swallow that rolls through Chris’s throat. “Celebrate.” 

Sebastian’s about to protest and shut down Chris’s unflagging need to push when he doesn’t have to, when there’s no need for it, but Chris lifts their joined hands to his mouth and breathes against Sebastian’s fingertips. And Sebastian can’t speak, Sebastian can never speak in the face of Chris, Chris, _Chris_.

He still gets blind-sided, by this love. He doesn’t think he’ll ever stop getting blind-sided by what it means to hold Chris’s heart.

“We’re together.” Chris whispers to the underside of his knuckles. “We have each other. We’re, you’re...”

There’s a wetness, there. There’s a single drop of heartbroken salt that trails down the curve of Chris’s pursed lips and onto Sebastian’s skin. It would have been enough for Sebastian to put a stop to this, to take Chris straight up to bed and offer comfort, offer proof upon proof that mourning wasn’t needed. Chris is smiling so softly, though, against Sebastian’s palm, and his eyes are bright enough to push aside that haze of grief. Sebastian’s giving in before he can think twice.

“Let’s go.”

Now, though, in the restaurant, with Chris’s eyes too damned wide and the pulse in his neck just shy of visible...

Sebastian probably should have pushed the fucking point. 

“Babe.” Sebastian reaches over the table to take Chris’s hand in his own. He had to swallow around the breathlessness that comes when he sees the way Chris stills, the way he relaxes automatically at Sebastian’s touch. 

“Come on, we’ll leave right now, we don’t have to wait.” Because the drive there had betrayed how much Chris just wanted to hold Sebastian, to cling to him and remind himself that Sebastian was there, and Sebastian had offered, and then declared flat out that they’d turn around and go home, but Chris wasn’t having it. They’d agreed to get dinner to go, and just have a drink while they waited.

Sebastian _should_ have turned them around when Chris had latched on to that offer without any fight. He should have.

“We don’t even have to get coffee, okay? We’ll go and we’ll get you home and we can just relax.” Sebastian strokes his thumb across Chris’s wrist until just the brush of a touch can’t chart the slam of his pulse anymore. He strokes until is does some _good_ , and even when it does, he doesn’t stop. “All right?”

“No.” Chris’s voice, for what it’s worth, is more steady than the rest of him. Only just, though, and Sebastian still worries. “No, we’re here, we…” Chris shakes his head. “I’m okay.” 

Sebastian shoots him a sceptical look. 

“I’ll _be_ okay.”

“Chris.” Sebastian sighs, waiting until Chris looks up to meet his eyes. “You don’t have to put on that face for me. You know that. Not for me. Ever.”

“I know. That’s not…” Chris bites his lower lip and lets a breath out slow between just the crack of his lips. 

“This is our weekend, you know?” There’s something pleading buried in that tone. “We’re celebrating something, here. We’re celebrating _us_ , and you made plans…”

Chris’s voice drifts for a moment, and it’s only because Sebastian knows Chris like the fucking back of his hand that he hears the crack in Chris’s voice that Chris doesn’t speak long enough to show.

“You’re here.” Chris picks up, his voice mostly made of straining, far too thin. “I _have_ you, here, with me. And I could have, you could have…”

Chris speaks long enough for the crack to be heard, this time, and Sebastian doesn’t hesitate to reach across the table and cup Chris’s cheek in his hand.

“Chris.” It’s him asking just as much as it’s him pleading. It’s him pleading just as much as it’s a demand, or an anchor. “Look at me.”

Chris doesn’t fight it. Chris’s eyes are too bright when they meet Sebastian’s. They’re too big and too full.

“I’m right here.” Sebastian says it, because maybe that’s all that will matter. Time, and touch, and truth, given and given again and again until there’s no other thing that can hold. “Okay?”

Sebastian watches, and he doesn’t dare to blink as Chris breathes, in and out. Chris’s eyes slip closed as when they open again, he nods.

Chris covers Sebastian’s hand with his own, and holds tight. It’s almost a catalyst, the spark of a flame. Sebastian didn’t know there was anything he wasn’t saying. Sebastian thinks he figured that the things never needed words.

Maybe they do. Maybe here, and now, like this, they do.

“Baby.” Sebastian lets Chris lead his hand to Chris’s mouth, where Chris just breathes against his fingers, fast at first and a little too shallow. “Chris, I make plans for _you_. I take you places because you’re in love with the world in this way that just…” Sebastian pauses, and traces the tip of his thumb against the curve of Chris’s lower lip. 

“You take my breath away, you know?” Sebastian says it: truth. And touch. “I take you to dinner because you don’t just eat, you savour. I take you to shows or to museums or to games or whatever, because you light up with them. You experience them with every bit of you. And watching you like that, being able to give that to you...”

Sebastian can’t help the smile that stretches his cheeks. It always does, when he thinks of Chris like this, when he thinks about how Chris looks when the world overcomes him in a _good_ way. The way Sebastian’s heart flutters, and has never stopped fluttering, to watch it happen, to see Chris’s soul on display so plainly. To know, beyond all reason, that Chris is _his_.

“I want you to be happy, always.” Sebastian says, because that is the foundation of what he thinks of as truth. “I know that’s impossible, it’s not possible for anyone, but I... I want to give you all the happiness you can stand. In every way. I want to give you all the life you can possibly wrap up inside you and…” Sebastian has to clear his throat, has to steady himself before he finishes. “And _glow_ , with.”

Chris’s eyes are still wide. Chris’s eyes are still too full. Chris’s eyes are still too bright.

Sebastian thinks of himself as something of an expert on the face, on the feelings, on the heart of his lover, though. And Chris’s eyes may still be all of those things, but it is different. It has shifted. It is warm.

It is _good_.

“Seb…”

Chris doesn’t finish the thought, but he doesn’t really need to. Sebastian hears it. He feels it, too. 

“I was…” Sebastian starts, and he doesn’t know what spurs him to start, or to continue, for that matter. He just knows that what he sees in Chris’s eyes is the same thing that floods his chest in every single moment. And maybe he can’t call it any one thing, but he has to try and make it known.

He’s got to _try_.

“I was just, like, reading. A while back. One of the books on the shelf that I hadn’t picked up before.”

And Chris’s eyes smile, just then. Because both know that means _one of the books you bought on a fucking whim, you big nerd_. They both say it often enough.

Their collection of books after all, between them, is enormous. 

“But it talked about how, like, the Buddhists say if you meet a person, and they make your knees weak, if they make your heart race, if they do all the things people talk about when they meet the one or whatever, then they’re not really the one.” And yeah, it’s one of Chris’s books. He likes that sort of thing, and Sebastian never disliked it, exactly, but it’s only because of Chris that he gives a damn. That he pays attention. That he picked that book up at all. 

“But they’re not the one, see, because the one, the person who’s _really_ the one doesn’t make you shake. They don’t make you anxious, but set you at ease. Perfect, like, solace. Or something. And I want…”

Sebastian’s breath catches, then, because that’s a dangerous way for him to start a sentence. That’s a dangerous way to tread on thin ice. The things he wants, in this. For them. He’d made plans this weekend, yeah.

The things he _wants_...

_Not now. It’s not the right time, not with Chris still hurting, not like this_.

He takes a deep breath. It can wait. He can wait. He will always wait.

The box is only in his pocket because he’d put it there when he was packing. Hopeful but not essential. It’s not pressing. It’ll keep. 

_Not now_.

“I want to be that.” 

And that’s true. At the core of everything that Sebastian wants, that’s what’s living there. That’s what drive the rest of forever, in his head. In his heart. 

“I want to be that for you. I don’t want to make your heart race. I want to make you so happy, and so peaceful, and so calm. I want to be your…” He sucks at his lip. “Your still point. I want to be where you feel safe.”

And Chris is looking at him in that way that curls up in Sebastian’s ribs and just expands, on and on until he doesn’t even wish that he could breathe. They’re in a restaurant. They’re in public. They’re in the world. There are other people.

None of it fucking matters one bit.

“I want to make your heart steady.” It comes out in a whisper, this confession of what it means to love Chris down to the bones. “So, so steady.” He’s still got a hand cupped near Chris’s neck, and he reaches his fingers just a little to touch on Chris’s pulsepoint at his jaw. 

“So calm. You understand?”

“You do.” Chris doesn’t flinch or pause in saying so, either. “You _absolutely_ do.”

It’s not what Sebastian may have planned or pondered for the weekend, no. But it’s better than a ring, he thinks. This, here, them. Better.

“Let’s go home.”

Sebastian never breaks eye contact as he moves to stand.

“No.” Chris says, soft and almost content, really. It’s kind of a surprise. “No, let’s stay.” His gaze is doe-ish, innocent in that way it gets sometimes. Young. “I want to stay here. With you.”

Sebastian watches him for a sequence of seconds. He doesn’t hide the way that he glances down to seek proof of Chris’s anxious heartbeat against his neck.

He only speaks when he can’t find it, when it’s not there fore him to see.

“You’re sure?”

Chris nods. “For coffee.”

“They’ll be quick with the food.” Sebastian says without knowing why he says it. He says it to comfort. To fill the space around him as completely as all the space within him feels sure. “If you even want the food, we don’t have to get the food...”

“Let’s get dessert.” Chris smiles, soft and satisfied as he drums his fingers gently but almost playfully in the spaces of Sebastian’s own fingers where his hand is settles on the table between them. “While we wait for the coffee. To go with the coffee.”

Sebastian doesn’t hesitate when he leans across and pecks at Chris’s mouth, just a soft press of lips.

“All right.” He says it against Chris’s lower lip, and a matching smile curves his own mouth as Chris visibly fights down a shiver. “All right. Dessert it is.”

***

Sebastian brings their food to bed, intent on feeding Chris in the comfort of their own bedroom. Together.

Chris doesn’t expect to be overwhelmed by it, again. Their bedroom. Together. 

He doesn’t expect it to happen, but it does.

“Right here.” And Sebastian is right there. He sees Chris start to fall apart again under the weight of almosts and the stopping of his heart in motion, and he reaches. He leads Chris to the bed. He straddles him gently and gathers him close, hands to Sebastian’s chest. 

“Just here, see?” He breathes out, over and over until Chris can stand to follow his example. “I’m right here.”

He is. Sebastian is right there. Truly.

He _is_.

“I love you.” Chris moves his mouth more than he makes any noise, suddenly choked. “I love you so much. I...”

“So much.” Sebastian picks up the sentiment, completes it perfectly as he runs his nose along the line of Chris’s jaw. “So, so much more than I even know the words for, not in any language, not in any way you can say because it’s too much, it’s...” 

“I can’t ever lose you, Seb.” Which is the point, really. Which is why Chris can seem to breathe. “I can’t. I won’t…” He won’t survive it. He won’t allow it. He won’t want to _be_...

“You won’t.” Sebastian’s framing his face, and he says it with enough force that Chris almost believes it. His heart almost does settle inside the conviction. “You won’t lose me.”

“You can’t promise that.” It chokes Chris, just to think it. Nevermind to say it.

But Sebastian doesn’t falter. “I _am_ promising that.”

Chris shakes his head, and his eyes are burning too harsh to see anything at all.

“No one can promise that.”

“Chris.”

Sebastian eases his chin upwards to meet the gaze that’s waiting, and Chris blinks as many times as he needs to to be able to make out Sebastian’s eyes.

“Chris, you are everything.” He says it like it’s plain. Like the sky is blue, the grass is green, and Chris is everything. Chris doesn’t understand how he’s allowed to have this. Chris doesn’t understand why the universe spared him the loss of something so fucking unbelievable, so incredible.

“Let me show you.” Sebastian is breathless, and Chris just stares as he leans in, and he presses closer to Chris’s body and kisses down his cheek.

“Let me show you, show you that you’ve got all of me, and you’ll never lose me.” Sebastian is so close that Chris can feel his breath on his skin, and the rise of his chest against Chris’s own. “You’ll never lose me, because you’ll have me.” He reaches, and catches Chris’s hand so to press his lips to the centre, and hold it there to breathe him in.

“You’ll have me always. Everything.” Sebastian is looking at him, staring straight into him and Chris knows. He knows. It’s real. They’re here.

He needs to _feel_ it.

“Let me,” Sebastian murmurs, pressed close as he tightens his thighs near Chris’s hips.

“Yes,” Chris breathes back. “God, yes.”

***

They’re both still slick with sweat, with exertion, with completion. With what it means to give everything, and to have it in return. Sebastian sleeps on top of Chris, those endless limbs tucked up around Chris’s body at every angle, undeniable. His head is tucked up tight under Chris’s chin, and Chris doesn’t think there’s a more perfect way to be in the world. In any world.

Sebastian’s weight on his chest makes it more clear than anything else: his pulse. It’s calm. It’s _steady_.

And Chris could have lost it. He could have lost this. One move different. One change unmade. One want, one need, one _love_ too soft to shift the tides.

He could have lost it, and he’d have never asked the question that’s been on his tongue for years, now. That he feels compelled to ask every time he opens his mouth and Sebastian’s near. Sometimes even when he isn’t. He’d have lost his heart without ever asking, and sure, they don’t need it. They’re here, and they’re committed, and they’re family more than blood.

But Chris could have lost this. He could have. He almost.

Tomorrow, he thinks. Tomorrow, he’ll ask.

Tomorrow, he’ll do it, and he knows that it’s right.

He’s happy. His heart is still calm. 

So steady.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to each and every one of you who has read this, and who has commented and left kudos and enjoyed it at all. Especially luninosity, who I'd dearly hoped would find something to like in this story. Thank you all for your kindness, and I hope that fluff was a good note to end things on :-)

He’s just about got the vegetables for the ciorbă simmering properly, and the cannelloni is in the oven already, when Chris wraps up around him from behind.

“Did you cancel the dinner reservations for tonight?” Chris asks. Sebastian can’t help but shiver at the warm press of his lips against Sebastian’s neck as he makes the words.

“Not yet.”

“Good.” Chris breathes in deeply, and it rustles Sebastian’s hair. “Don’t.”

Sebastian frowns, adjusting the heat on the stovetop. 

“We’ve _got_ dinner.” 

“Dinner for tomorrow, then. You know I won't let any of this go to waste.” Chris leans in to press a kiss behind Sebastian’s ear, and the feeling of those lips curled in a tiny smile against Sebastian’s skin is heavenly. It flutters wildly in Sebastian’s chest.

“But let’s go out tonight.” Sebastian isn’t sure if Chris means to nip at the lobe of his ear when he speaks. It probably doesn’t matter either way, though. The effect of it is the same. “Tonight is special.”

Sebastian tips his head back over Chris’s waiting shoulder, turning to kiss at the line of Chris’s neck.

“You’re sure?” He whispers, because the moment feels charged in a way he can’t explain. There’s something in it, though. And maybe Sebastian should protest going out at all, after yesterday. Maybe he should.

But there’s something in this. There’s something thick and full of promise in the air.

Sebastian closes his eyes and lets his lips drag down the side of Chris’s neck as he breathes in and then out again.

“Positive.” Sebastian feels the word rise up from the hollow of throat. It’s intimate in ways he’d never bothered to imagine before he met Chris. Before he loved Chris. Before he made a life with Chris.

“Okay.” Sebastian says. It’s not the right answer, somehow. It doesn’t carry enough weight.

Chris kisses him anyway though, and that carries as much weight as anything.

***

Sebastian shouldn’t have worried.

Save for a little more of Chris’s tactile side coming out over their dessert course, dinner was lovely. The meal itself was gorgeous, and the company unparalleled, as ever.

And maybe their enthusiasm for tasting one another mouth to neck makes the trip up the stairs more an adventure than need be once they get home, but it's fantastic. 

They're fantastic. 

Sebastian might have accidentally put the small velvety box he's been carrying around like a luck charm for two years in his pocket before they left. 

Habit. 

They'd barely made it to the bed, hadn't even got undressed. Sebastian's utterly boneless now, loose from head to toe and just a bit buzzed with the bliss of it as he sits perched on the edge of the bath, right trouser leg rolled up to test the water as it fills. 

He takes the opportunity to watch Chris undoing his tie with those gorgeous fucking hands of his. The fly on his trousers is only half zipped, unbuttoned and hanging low off of his hips. 

The water in the bath is hot against his skin, up to the ankle, but Sebastian is presently being flooded with a warmth that's so much bigger. A warmth that means so much more. 

"Almost halfway there." He smiles at Chris where Chris is leaning against the doorway. 

Chris smiles back at him, and there's something layered in the curve of his lips. Sebastian wants to lick it clean and find it. Sebastian wants to kiss Chris until there's nothing left in the universe.

"I love you." Chris tells him, those eyes big in his face, innocent in a way Sebastian's never been able to wrap his head around, because Chris is so full of the world somehow. He is so touch and saturated with it. But then he's never broken by it, never tainted by it. 

Sebastian thinks he might live twenty loves and never comprehend the miracle that is this man he loves. 

"You know that, right?" Chris chews his lower lip, full of earnestness and absolute truth. "I love you."

Sebastian reaches out a hand, wiggling his fingers in invitation. 

"I love you too, babe." Chris is next to him in an instant, slipping fingers in between Sebastian's own and pulling himself in towards Sebastian's chest. He leans down and kisses Sebastian like the world's going to end, and Sebastian's heart starts pounding for it, drowning out the rush of water at his back. 

They're both breathing heavily when they part. Chris slides to his knees and rests his cheek against Sebastian's thigh. The smile he aims up at Sebastian is boundless. 

"I forget..." Chris starts, and nuzzles at the soft fabric of Sebastian's slacks. "I forget what happiness meant before you. Like, what it meant to feel happy. Or to be in awe of the whole world in that way where it used to fill me up and almost make me dizzy. Where it'd almost hurt inside my chest just to breathe around it all."

Chris pulls back and looks Sebastian straight in the eyes. The deepest parts of him are visible between blinks, and it catches on Sebastian's throat while Chris looks down again and starts to draw circles on top of the soft flesh of his thigh. 

"Because..." Chris breathes in deeply and leans to kiss Sebastian's clothed kneecap. "Because _with_ you, I'm always happy. I don’t mean I’m never, like, that things never get me. But there’s _you_. And you make me _more_ than happy. I'm..." 

Chris works his lips around words that don't seem to want to come out, or ones that maybe don't fit correctly. Eventually he gives up and just brings Sebastian's palm to his lips. 

"And it's _you_ filling up my chest and making me so in awe that you're even real, and that you're mine, that you want me, that you're still here and that you love me too and then somehow, somehow you, you're..."

Chris's eyes are brimming. Chris's eyes are shining so bright as he struggles again for words, and Sebastian wants to reach out and just save him, just hold him and say yes, yes I know, yes me too, yes I love---

Sebastian's hand is being drawn to Chris's chest. Right up against Chris's beating heart. 

"Steady." Chris murmurs, his smile soft. "I don't know how to find that without you, anymore." The softness in his smile starts to quirk towards something like wonder. "Maybe I never did."

Sebastian doesn't quite know when his throat got so tight or his eyes began to sting. He only just notices the force of his own pulse as Chris lifts his free and hand cups Sebastian's cheek. 

"You're beautiful, you know that?" He whispers as he brushes a stray year from Sebastian's skin. Sebastian hadn't even realised that it had fallen, but they both know that there's no sorrow inside it, that that's not the kind of tear it is.  

"Not just..." Chris strokes along the bone of his cheek with a tenderness that Sebastian's never exactly deserved but has always treasured. "But you're drawing us a bath. You made dinner. My favourites. You hold me. You just reach out and you make the world right when I've got your hand in mine." He squeezes the hand in his in time with the squeeze of the heart beneath their joined grasp. 

"You wanted me." It takes him a moment, but Sebastian catches the way Chris starts to blink too quickly. "You needed me as much as I need you and you came home, you left early, you..."

Chris's breath starts to come in short gasps, and the heartbeat that's under Sebastian's hand is coming heavier and quicker by the second. Sebastian's own heart skips painfully before it twists inside his chest. 

"I..." Chris's voice doesn't get a chance to break mid-sound. It's broken already. 

"I thought you were gone." Chris rasps out, and his tears are part-sorrow, at least, when they fall. "For...just minutes, really. I don't remember more than minutes, between..."

Chris chokes on the words, but they're just as much a threat to the vital parts of Sebastian's being. He can see Chris in his mind's-eye curled on the floor in the kitchen, sobbing himself dry in the guest bed, breaking because of _Sebastian_.

"I thought you were _gone_." Chris's voice is hardly a scratch, and it sends shocks through Sebastian's ribs, threatens the tick of his pulse. "And you're the air, Sebastian. You're the sun and moon and I think I maybe gave you my heart the moment I met you, somehow. And I thought you were gone, and I couldn't breathe. I couldn't think. Everything was falling in, squeezing so tight and it just hurt, everywhere, except at the same time, I was empty. There was nothing. I was..."

Chris's mouth is opening and closing but the only sound that's coming out is something close to a whine. Something much too like to a moan. 

"Chris."

"But then you were there." Chris's voice is a whisp and nothing more but it marvels. 

"I hadn't lost you. The world hadn't ended." His breath catches. Sebastian covers the hand at his cheek and prays that he's a passable touchstone to hold to. 

"I woke up, and the nightmare was over. You were breathing. And you're the air, so I could breathe again, too. You were warm and I could feel you. You put the heart back into my chest and I could, I was, you..."

Chris shakes, and Sebastian tights his hand against both of Chris's in turn, as present as he can be. He breathes as deeply as his lungs will allow, just to prove he's there. 

"I could think again." Chris tells him. "And all I could think about was..."

Sebastian's not sure how Chris manages to give under Sebastian's touch when he's the one holding Sebastian's hand to his chest, and he's the one with a palm curved to the line of Sebastian's cheek. But that's exactly what happens. Chris gives into whatever Sebastian's offering, whatever pieces of the whole of him Chris needs in the now because the whole of him is always there. The whole of him belongs to Chris. 

"I can't lose you." Chris's voice splinters, and the words spiral down into a whimper. "If you'd been on that plane, I don't know what I would have done. I don't know if there would have been enough of me left to _do_ anything. To _be_ anything."

The truth is that nothing Chris is saying is foreign to Sebastian. Nothing Chris is telling him rings anything less than true in Sebastian's own heart. He can't even bring himself to imagine what would happen if he lost Chris. His chest tightens and his world narrows at just the suggestion of the thought. 

That doesn't make hearing it from Chris's mouth any easier. That doesn't mean it breaks his heart any less. 

"And I love you." Chris says in that way that he's got that means the facts of the world and the laws of physics are all flexible, compared to the certainty of this one true thing. "The kind of love that's not just this...thing you feel. But the kind that becomes you. That strengthens your bones. Teaches you how to be everything you'd ever hoped you could someday become. Teaches you to stretch beyond yourself and take someone else in, more deeply. To know and hold and cherish someone so fully they're in your veins."

Sebastian's breathless. Sebastian's speechless. He hopes the things that Chris is saying are mirrored strongly enough in his eyes. 

"I _love_ you." Chris lifts their threaded hands from his chest to his lips, and kisses Sebastian's wrist. "And I don't need to tell the world. I don't need a proclamation or a piece of paper. It changes nothing. It can't make what I feel any stronger, because this is the strongest thing, the most important thing..."

Sebastian isn't sure if he's understanding what's being said, underneath what's being said. He can feel his heartbeat where it stands out against Chris's mouth. He doesn't know if Chris can feel it, too. 

He kind of hopes that Chris can, though. He wants Chris to know how deep all of this is felt. 

"But I thought I'd lost you." The thumb that strokes the side of Sebastian's face is broad, but it's motion trembles. "And with the last breaths I had left as the air went away, I thought, you're my world. You're my hope. You're my centre. You're my anchor and my light and the laughter that lifts me and you're undefinable. You're more than my mind can understand but you make perfect sense. You make perfect sense because you fit here." Chris leads Sebastian's hand back to his chest and breathes in. 

“You fit here _perfectly_.”

Sebastian chokes back the sob that wants to shake him, but that doesn't mean every part of him isn't shivering with the things Chris is saying, with the feeling Chris is letting show and giving brightly and freely and with all that he is. Because Sebastian is shaking with that. Head to foot. 

"And I thought I'd lost you before I could ask. Before I'd finally grown the fuckin' balls to ask if you'd be one more thing."

It suddenly becomes very clear that Chris is kneeling in front of Sebastian. That his teach is long and his heart is bare and he's on his knees just now. 

He...

"Seb." And only Chris know how to say his name, know how to put the kind of love that the world spins for into those letters, those sounds. "Seb, you, I..." His cheeks are wet. Sebastian's are too.

There's no sorrow in these tears. 

"Will you marry me?"

Sebastian's not entirely sure that he could speak, that an answer could for in words and emerge from his mouth if his life depended on it. 

The laugh that builds up and falls forth instead is pure joy, free in ways words could never be. The way he kisses Chris is freer still. 

They only part to breathe, because both of them can. Chris has a box in his hand. He opens it. Raises an eyebrow. 

Sebastian laughs again and kisses him hard because words are worth less. They mean less. He stands, one leg dripping wet from the bath that’s only been saved from flooding by the overflow port, and gathers Chris’s hands to kiss them as he takes his own tiny box from his pocket. He folds down onto his knees to meet Chris in all ways. The rings are tellingly similar. Sebastian’s pulse, somehow, is steady.

"Only if you'll do me the honour in return."

And it's Chris's turn to laugh and then to kiss, and they match perfectly. They fit perfectly. 

They leave the bath for later.


End file.
